In this episode we speak Toni Giselle Stuart. Toni is a Sacred Storykeeper of the Womb. She listens for the stories that heal our inherited and ancestral traumas, reclaim our ancestral wisdoms and gifts, so that we can remember who and what we truly are. She generously lets us into her novel The Sonambulism Trilogy, a series of stories that she has been listening and bringing to life over the past 6 years.
Born and raised in Camissa, at the foot of Hoerikwaggo, she works as a writer and poet. Her work is guided and informed by this land where the Indian and Atlantic Ocean currents merge, and the mountain rises out of the sea. She is the founder of The Firefly Garden, where she teaches writing courses and workshops that help you reconnect with the power of your words through heart, body & land, so you can write the stories you were born to write.
Toni says “What makes you feel alive is in how you bring your gifts to the world.” Her body of work is certainly evident of her aliveness. Vivid and lyrical her work is a gift that pours love into language, body and land. This episode is as profound as it is pleasurable. So get a cup of tea of dear soul hummers, light a candle and enjoy the gift of Toni Giselle Stuart.
Toni Giselle Stuart - Body of work
Her writing is published in the journals Poetry (2022) and Callaloo (2019); the anthology Our Ghosts Were Once People (ed, Bongani Kona, Jonathan Ball, 2021), as well as other anthologies, journals and non-fiction books.
Some of her projects include Krotoa-Eva’s Suite, in collaboration with filmmaker Kurt Orderson (Amsterdam and Cape Town, 2016); Poetry, Paramedics and Film with filmmaker/health researcher Leanne Brady (2018); I Come To My Body As A Question with dotdotdot dance (UK & Sweden, 2016 – 2020); What the Water Remembers at Woordfees (2020); forgetting. and memory with vangile gantsho & Vusumzi Ngxande at the Virtual National Arts Festival 2020. From 2020 to 2022, she was part of Future for the Past by Sites of Memory, a multi-disciplinary site-specific performance project in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Cape Town, that re-imagined Dutch - South Africa colonial and slave histories.
In 2013, she was named in the Top 200 Young South Africans list by the Mail and Guardian. She was the founding curator of Poetica, at Open Book Festival. She has an MA Writer/Teacher (Distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a 2014/2015 Chevening Scholar.
WEBSITE: https://tonistuart.com/
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